eWeb is transforming our lives: it is increasingly where people communicate with their friends, nd employment, make purchases, look for romantic partners, and stay in touch with the world. As the new platforms for daily life, digital social systems deliver billions of dollars of value to the economy and a huge amount of social capital to society. Despite their importance, however, these system...

Aggressive competition is an important aspect of social interactions, but conflict can be costly. Some animals are thought to minimize the costs of conflict by using conventional signals of agonistic ability (i.e. badges of status) to assess rivals. Although putative badges have been found in a range of taxa, little research has tested whether individuals use badges to assess potential rivals b...

Context: Test-Driven development (TDD) is a software development approach where test cases are written before actual development of the code in iterative cycles. TDD has gained attention of many software practitioners during the last decade since it has suggested several benefits in the software development process. However, empirical evidence of its dominance in terms of internal code quality,...

Students’ perception of excessive difficulty in STEM degrees lowers their motivation and, therefore, affects performance. According to prior research, the use gamification techniques promote engagement, motivation, and fun when learning. Badges, which are a distinction that is given as reward students, well-known tool. This contribution hypothesizes badges, both physical virtual, improves stude...

Digital badging is becoming more popular in an assortment of disciplines, both academic and professional. Along with the success of practical badging initiatives, badging research is also moving at a rapid pace, a rate of change that may be intimidating to the uninitiated wishing to study them. However, there is a great need for additional research in light of the complexity of badging and the ...

INTRODUCTION The angular dependency of response for TLD cards may cause deviation from its true value on the results of environmental dosimetry, since TLDs may be exposed to radiation at different angles of incidence from the surrounding area. OBJECTIVE A 3D setting of TLD cards has been calibrated isotropically in a standard radiation field to evaluate the improvement of the accuracy of meas...

Several national and international organizations have developed various types and levels of external audits for radiotherapy dosimetry, either based on on-site review visits or using mailed dosimetry systems. Three major TLD (thermoluminescent dosimetry) networks make available postal dose audits to a large number of radiotherapy centres on a regular basis. These are the IAEA/WHO TLD postal dos...

In 1954, Cohen and Barner discovered that a thymine auxotrophic (thyA) mutant of Escherichia coli undergoes cell death in response to thymine starvation. This phenomenon, called thymineless death (TLD), has also been found in many other organisms, including prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Though TLD has been studied intensively, its molecular mechanism has not yet been explained. Previously we repo...

During early Drosophila embryogenesis, several zygotic gene products act to establish a posttranscriptional activity gradient of the morphogen DPP. Among these molecules, Tolloid, a putative metalloprotease related to BMP-1, enhances DPP function, while SOG, an ortholog of the Xenopus organizer Chordin, inhibits DPP function. Using epistasis tests and a Xenopus secondary axis induction assay, w...